Portraits in blue: water and distress in contemporary women's writing in French

Thesis

This thesis argues that critical and creative connections between water and distress are an important but understudied feature of contemporary women’s writing in French. My analyses are principally concerned with understanding the relationship between water and distress in work by Marie Darrieussecq (b. 1969), Nathacha Appanah (b. 1973), Amélie Nothomb (b. 1966), and Fatou Diome (b. 1968). Over four chapters, I argue that water provides a vital imaginary through which protagonists experience their bodies and the world around them, notably in situations of distress. In some cases, physical encounters with water come to inform protagonists’ inner lives. In others, water is a resource of figurative imagery that can be drawn upon — by the protagonist, the author, or both — to describe mental processes and emotional states. Experience inflected by water may otherwise spring from collective histories, particularly in and around the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, or from diverse cultural approaches to the universe and its metaphysics. I follow water through representations of grief and trauma, mapping in tandem a number of recurrent themes, including silence, the unsayable, sexual violence, memory, dance, rhythm, matrilineage, passage, and morethan-humanness. I take a range of conceptual approaches in my analyses, including posthumanist feminist theory, decolonial approaches to trauma theory, and Indigenous animist thought. I bring these lenses together across chapters, highlighting how different approaches to the body and its surroundings reveal an ever-changing and reciprocal enmeshment of human and non-human. Throughout, I adopt the posthumanist thinking of Astrida Neimanis as a cornerstone for my analyses while also remaining attuned to the specific social, political, and geographical situations of my primary texts. In so doing, I identify the thinking of Darrieussecq, Appanah, Nothomb, and Diome as characterised by variously feminist, ecocritical, decolonial, and creative aims that look to probe, challenge, and write the body anew.

Authors: Walters, E

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-7rgqeqbeb
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English